


Sharing

by Lilliburlero



Category: The Charioteer - Mary Renault
Genre: Alternative Literary History, Literary References & Allusions, M/M, Pre-Canon, Queer Culture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-20
Updated: 2015-06-20
Packaged: 2018-04-05 07:53:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,119
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4171884
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alec brings back a queer book from France.</p><p>*</p><p>Advisory: period-typical language to describe sexuality, sustained and gratuitous ragging on E.M. Forster.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sharing

**Author's Note:**

  * For [toujours_nigel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/toujours_nigel/gifts).



It was a novelty to Alec to be the weary traveller returned, not one he could wholly relish, for Ralph’s welcome could scarcely have been more solicitous had he just got back from―well, from Quebec, rather than an out-of-season week in a cousin’s villa overlooking the seafront at Hardelot-Plage. Thinking he must dissuade Ralph from a shore job at all costs, Alec deflected his fussing the best (and only) way he knew, with the result that they dined wearing dressing gowns and from a single cup and plate at one in the morning.

‘Do try, Alec. We can’t leave two separate half-eaten bits for Mrs Pickering to find. She’ll be intolerable.’ 

‘You’re not very resourceful, are you?’ Alec picked up both pieces of bread and cream cheese, dropped them into the grate, and raked it over. In the reviving firelight, innumerable generations of professional bourgeois confidence met the inscrutability of a disowned son of trade, first and last of his people to attend a public school. Alec felt as if he’d been knocked down, but it was Ralph who looked away first. 

‘I’ve one more bottle of beer, if you fancy sharing.’ 

Alec’s laughter, high-pitched as a consequence of the momentary strain, nonetheless relieved it. 

Ralph shook his head in tolerant puzzlement. ‘It’s a bit makeshift, I know. I might have offered you my tooth-mug, I suppose.’ 

‘Not that,’ Alec gasped. ‘It’s―hang on. Lend me your pocket-knife?’ 

Ralph’s coat hung on the chipped japanned screen that hid his bed; without needing to get up, he fished in the pocket and brought out a piece of formidable and hideous ironmongery. 

Alec pushed up the lid of his suitcase and slashed open a row of sutures in its lining. ‘Quite needless, of course. Customs barely glanced at me.’ He withdrew a dismembered book. Ralph took it. The name on the title-page was transparently pseudonymous. He looked up queryingly. 

‘Sandro Pharos?’ 

‘Forster.’ 

‘The _Passage to India_ bloke? I thought you despised―’ 

‘I’m not sure I still don’t. But this one is about being queer.’ 

‘He is, I suppose?’ 

‘Oh yes.’ 

Ralph stacked the spatchcocked volume on his knee and laid it carefully aside atop a paperbound journal of which only the concluding IRE of the title remained visible. ‘Thank you, my dear. I’ll read it with great pl―’ 

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake. I’d rather you spent the time re-reading _Greenmantle_ , if that’s how you feel about it.’ Alec handed over the knife. ‘Yes to the beer, please.’ 

The next morning he got up to find Ralph in the armchair, his feet up on the table beside the coffee-pot and the unbound leaves spread over his thighs. 

‘Hullo, Alec. It’s nearly cold, I’m afraid. What revolting stuff. Putrid.’ He gestured with his bare foot, a member insufficiently eloquent despite its slender shapeliness to make his referent clear. 

‘―Ralph―’ 

‘I’ve about a third of that Dundee cake left, if you’re hungry.’ 

‘No, thanks.’ 

Alec poured the remainder of the coffee into Ralph’s drained cup. It had, to his irritation, been made as he liked it and Ralph did not: a dense sugary emulsion. Passages of the novel, which he had read in a single sitting while his companions were out touring a château and the Channel roiled greyly beyond the picture window, returned to him. He sensed he had given a gift pointed enough to constitute cruelty even by his sometimes brutal standard: the opening primal scene with the obscurely horrific image of sand-drawn diagrams half-obliterated by the sea; the unnaturally pure tone of school following an expulsion; chapter after chapter set in Cambridge; a man forcing himself to the enjoyment of women. And in its inaptnesses it seemed scarcely less barbed: the protagonist’s unambitious stolidity, so alien to Ralph’s temperament; the sexless friendship; the sentimentalisation of a taste for rough. He was for a moment overcome by an impulse to snatch it from Ralph’s lap, substituting himself. The extravagance of the thought supplied its own recalibration―the book was so clangorously resonant only because of the prevailing silence, as a handbell might be more shattering than a carillon. And for him there was furthermore―Alec blushed for the stupid coincidence of nomenclature, as might a timid schoolboy to discover that he has the same given name as a prefect he’s keen on. 

‘Bloody hell. Listen to this. “The violence went out of his heart, and a purity that he had never imagined―’ Ralph’s voice tightened into a prim drone with an unmistakably clerical original, utterly unlike the savage, measured intonation with which he was wont to quote actual Scripture, ‘ “―dwelt there instead. His friend had called him." ’ He took a little gulping breath and pursed his lips. ‘ "He stood for a moment entranced, then the new emotion found him words, and laying his hand very gently upon the pillows―” ’ 

_Pillows_ seemed suddenly the most ridiculous word in the four languages in which Alec could claim tolerable fluency―hilarity pressed like a tiny fist at the base of his diaphragm and issued in a indecorous honk. Startled, Ralph looked up, ' "and answered",’ he choked, ‘ “Clive!” Clive! The fucker’s fucking name is fucking _Clive_!’ 

This strain of laughter proved one of the very few against which Ralph had neither a natural nor an inculcated immunity, and his susceptibility now seemed in proportion to the number of times he had in the past sat warily smiling in the midst of a half-hysterical group. He howled and wheezed, banging the arm of the chair; blood rushed to his face and a turbulent lock of hair bounded on his brow. The pages slithered between his legs, landing on the floor with a patter somehow faintly indecent. 

‘Oh, darling,’ Alec wailed, wiping his eyes, ‘you haven’t seen the half of it yet.’ 

Over the course of Ralph’s remaining week ashore it became their ritual: they met whenever they might, and read it aloud in turns, snorting heartlessly. At the hero’s somnambulant summoning of the under-gamekeeper to his bedroom they became incapable of human posture, rolling on the linoleum and plucking convulsively at one another, until their grips steadied and they read no more that day. The intransitive use of ‘share,’ coming after ten p.m., prompted a complaint to Mrs Pickering from the commercial traveller in Number Five; Ralph mollified her with the jokes allegedly responsible, collected from Pathétone Weekly acts and dolled up in baby blue. Forty years later, the mouthed words _Boathouse Penge_ could still induce quivering shoulders in the old friends and perplexity in whatever boring or solemn company from which they thus sought puerile respite. 

Neither of them ever told the other that when he had read _Maurice_ in solitude, he had wept.

**Author's Note:**

> In reality E.M. Forster's novel _Maurice_ was published posthumously, in 1971. This imagines a Parisian publication for it in the 30s.
> 
> The reaction (excepting the last line) of Alec and Ralph to _Maurice_ is roughly that of their author to _The Well of Loneliness_.


End file.
